Hey, y’all. Hope…

Hey, y'all. Hope everyone's doing well, and that all the Americans among you are heading into the homestretch on taxes as the last week starts up. As it turned out, I didn't need to file state taxes, so as soon as I make some copies of the forms, I can send 'em off.

Well, I think I've had my most embarrassing foray into the print world. I'm not going to link to it, but if you find SF Weekly's recent article on COPA, you might as well read it. It's a decent article, even if she didn't bother to correct my somewhat sloppy grammar (did I really say it like that??), *and* used my journal entry of that day to make me look inept (though it did seem to prove her point). Sigh. I do wish she'd referred to a few of the content-relevant things I said, such as the point about the way in which using credit cards as age verification is both ineffective and discriminatory...but I suppose any publicity is better than no publicity, and it's in a good cause. Still embarrassing, though.

If I do an interview with someone and don't let them check it before I publish it (if humanly possible, given deadlines), y'all should feel free to slap me. Informational interviews should be about conveying information most effectively, and if that means they need a chance to polish and rewrite it before it goes up, I should give it to them. That's part of why I like conducting interviews in e-mail, actually.

Other news. Well, I got woken up by hail last night! Weird. It's been alternately bright, sunny, raining and hailing all day. Very strange weather we're having. I've been drinking pots of tea because I've been getting so cold (my fingers are like ice, and I probably shouldn't be typing without heating the house a bit more), and I know this cold weather isn't good for my poor herbs. They *did* survive the hail okay (protected by eaves), so maybe they'll make it through to warmer weather. The basil is getting miserably eaten up, though, and I don't know by what. Everything else seems fine. Anyone know what likes basil? Karen suggested putting down tobacco around it to keep away pests, so I may be buying my first pack of cigarettes this afternoon. :-)

Read a few books lately, the most recent being Charles de Lint's _Mulengro_, a gypsy tale that I found in a used bookstore (Grey Wolf, I think, or maybe Pendragon). I'm a big de Lint fan, so I was very excited to find this -- especially since I hadn't heard of it before. It's a problem, when authors switch publishers and the new publishers don't list the books done by the old publisher in that handy little list on the inside cover (flyleaf, etc.). I suppose I could go hunt up books in print, but I'm not even sure this is still in print. Probably isn't, actually. Annoying. (But a good book. :-)

Am now back to tackling Nabokov's _Ada_, which, next to Joyce's _Ulysses_, may be the most challenging novel I've looked at (I haven't made it past the first chapter of the Joyce yet, though I plan to come back to it someday). I never thought I'd say this, but the man is just too erudite. He uses *so* many words I don't know -- and that's just the English. He also seems to expect you to know French and German, and his 12-yr-old protagonist blithely slides from language to language -- thank goodness most of the narration is third-person English. The book got much easier to read a few chapters in (I had basically skimmed the first chapters and was about to give up in despair when it suddenly got more manageable, but it's still a question of read a paragraph, skim a paragraph, alternate and hope you get the gist. Oof. Maybe Nabokov has some easier books. I don't remember _Lolita_ or _Pale Fire_ being this bad.

Getting through the eHow articles -- they're going more smoothly now. Hopefully in a few weeks I'll just be skimming through them. I should do some clean-up and packing; writers' group meeting tonight, and then finish up some articles tonight and tomorrow morning -- ideally, I'd like to have all 20 done before it's time to go to the airport (lunchtime). We'll see how that goes.

Had dinner at a really nice place last night, btw. Arthur took me to Burmese restaurant near the Rockridge BART where he had spinach and tomatoes in a light curry, and I had an amazing dish, composed of: onions, scallions, bell pepper strips, mushrooms, prawns and ripe mango slices, stir-fried with I think a little peanut oil and soy sauce. It was *so* good. I had it over rice, but I think it would also make an excellent summer salad straight up. I'm going to try to reproduce it sometime.

(So do y'all not like the little photo galleries? Hardly a peep out of you. They're a fair bit of effort to do, so unless I hear that people like them, I probably won't bother to do anymore. Not a threat, just a comment. :-)

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